Claustrogyny

Claustrogyny


In Two-thousand-three,
early in Spring,
I had a dream.
I guested at the house
of a hoary woman.
My closest friends followed me there.
She lodged us in a loft,
high-vaulted, windowless.
In the dark above, the rafters ranged unseen;
the floor planks ran under cover of dark.
It smelt of hay and musty dust.
Dry as a bone, but wet on the ends.
Wide wooden columns reached up to the vault, lost in shadow.
Surroundng each pillar, and piled in each corner,
lay half discernable urns and bins,
wooden chests, stacks of hair,
matted and manged.

Thick stuck under heavy covers, she bedded us down on the floor.
Quick as a spider, the spindly crone snuffed out the lights.
She spun her threads.
Wire-wool blankets she spread on the walls. The air hung stuck on the pricks of stubble.
Her silkworm body slipped away in a crack; her white withers sank away in the black.
Gone, O Yes.
Instead of sleep, I began to snoop, what fun.
I ransacked the boxes and bins, cramming fat sacks with handfuls of grime.
With my hands I sliced the viscous air, squeezing the flesh of dust.
I stuffed the sacks as fast as I could, bulging with bird-bones and clodded dung.

With a twist of anger, she reeled around.
Her hands fell like flails, gripping the sacks, dumping the dust and thrashing the chaff.
She vanished with a whish and vampish whisk.
Then sudden return.
Four steps she took, four deadfalling notes descending.
Dank dour power.
With one fast push, she packed a pillow flush in the door.

I crouched and creeped, slunk over friends asleep in the dark.
I heard long pauses between their heaves, their slow lungs lifting their coma chests.
I fingered and felt the flow of the walls, their nooks and nicks, the ungrovelled grooves.
I groped onto hinges, long-line creases, the unseen frame of a door.
In a fit of defiance, I pushed on the wood.
The wall swung open,
the swinging doors of a mammoth mow.
I yanked at the bins, the boxes and bones.
I hurled in haste, heaving in handfuls.
Lifted tables and dressers, desks and chairs - crashed them on tarmac below.
They smacked and splintered far down hard. The wind blew eddies in the sunlit grit.

With troll-steps of wroth, she strode straight back.
My friends rubbed their eyes in the blinding light.
Get out! I bellowed like a billow of wind.
Whirring, a helicopter hovered at the doors. Ropeladders fell for my wobbly friends.
I stayed back, stalking.
In all her height she stood still, hard by a pillar.
I walked behind her, wrapped her,
folded her flanks,
fondled her silken belly,
blew into her ear.
Her head sank back, her ice-eyes shut.
Her anger went out in a pang of pain,
her silkwarm skin turned to snow and stone.